Italy

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A chorus line girl, Virginia and a small time smuggler, Aldo try to be together and change their lives. He cannot find a job however while she has to bear lots of men making passes at her.Read More »

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From Dario Argento, maestro of the macabre and the man behind some the greatest excursions in Italian horror (Suspiria, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage), comes Deep Red – arguably the ultimate giallo movie.

One night, musician Marcus Daly (David Hemmings, Blow Up), looking up from the street below, witnesses the brutal axe murder of a woman in her apartment. Racing to the scene, Marcus just manages to miss the perpetrator… or does he? As he takes on the role of amateur sleuth, Marcus finds himself ensnared in a bizarre web of murder and mystery where nothing is what it seems…Read More »

A come Andromeda is an Italian TV miniseries in five hour-long parts, broadcast in 1972 on RAI, the Italian state broadcaster. It was directed by Vittorio Cottafavi and adapted by Inisero Cremaschi from the book by Fred Hoyle and John Elliot, itself adapted from the BBC’s 1961 series A for Andromeda by the same authors, which is now mostly lost. It stars Luigi Vannucchi, Paola Pitagora, Tino Carraro and Nicoletta Rizzi, with performances from Arturo Dominici, Mario Piave, Claudio Cassinelli, Gabriella Giacobbe, Enzo Tarascio, Giampiero Albertini, Sandro Tuminelli and others.Read More »

March on Rome (Italian: La marcia su Roma) is a 1962 comedy film by Dino Risi with Vittorio Gassman and Ugo Tognazzi, aimed at describing the March on Rome of Benito Mussolini’s black shirts from the point of view of two newly recruited, naïve black shirts.Read More »

To the priest in a small Italian town, the Splendor cinema (now sold for redevelopment) is a ‘dark grotto of sin’; to owner Jordan (Mastroianni), it’s a shrine. But writer/director Scola is more concerned with the grey areas between such views: the patrons who desert cinema in droves when TV offers cheap, undemanding entertainment. Using flashback and clips, he conveys something of the medium’s superiority over the box, at the same time beautifully unravelling a tale of life-long devotion and hard graft from Jordan, his long-term lover/usherette (Vlady), and the projectionist (Troisi). Their temperamental relationships over two decades are conveyed with great affection by the accomplished cast; and the film is full of wonderful moments – such as the homage to Capra at the climax – which manage to be both magical and unsentimental.Read More »

Visconti’s retelling of the Electra story starts with Sandra/Electra (Cardinale) returning to her ancestral home in Italy – and reviving an intimate involvement with her brother (Sorel) which troubles her naive American husband (Craig) – on the eve of an official ceremony commemorating the death of her Jewish father in a Nazi concentration camp. As ever with Visconti, he is ambivalently drawn to the decadent society he is ostensibly criticising; and Armando Nannuzzi’s camera lovingly caresses the creaking old mansion, set in a landscape of crumbling ruins, where the incestuous siblings determine to wreak revenge on the mother (Bell) and stepfather (Ricci) who supposedly denounced their father. Something like a Verdi opera without the music, the result may not quite achieve tragedy, but it looks marvellous. The title, culled from a poem by Leopardi, has been better rendered as ‘Twinkling Stars of the Bear’.Read More »

Aboard a ship late in the 19th-century, a middle-aged Italian tells his story of love to a Russian. In a series of flashbacks filmed almost entirely in creams, whites, and ochers, the clownish and superfluous Romano Patroni leaves his wife’s opulent home to visit a spa where he falls in love with a Russian woman whose marriage is a horror. He pursues her into the Russian heartland and returns to Italy resolved to leave his wife and marry his love.Read More »

Barbara Carey flies to Italy to visit her blind sister Mary Ann, who is studying in a music academy. Once in Rome Barbara discovers her sister has disappeared and, according to the Italian police, she may have been murdered by a maniac who is obsessed with young sightless women. With the help of Martin Foster, from the British Embassy, Barbara starts trying to find out what happened to Mary Ann. She even pretends to be blind herself in an attempt to attract the killer, and finally the clues lead her to Seagull Island, privately owned by a mysterious British citizen named David Malcolm. Barbara must then find the answers to several questions: was Mary Ann really kidnapped? What happened to David’s wife and son in the island? And why is David’s relative Carol so unhappy to see a woman with him?Read More »

It is the story of a romantic relationship, between meetings and separations, passion and pain, illusions and disappointments, from 1982 to 2000, of which twelve moments (“twelve fragments of a discourse eighteen years long love discourse”), represented through as many planes sequence, introduced by short animated sequences, created by Studio Elle from Laura Federici’s drawings. The film closes with the poem A Memory by Umberto Saba.Read More »